Why Randell Mills does not appear credible to most people (yet)

Life is not a popularity contest for Randell Mills.  Yet, he is quite sociable and it seems that everyone who has had the chance to know him thinks highly of him.  He's not normal in the sense of being anywhere near average intelligence and I expect that made social interactions challenging many times.  His very intense desire to understand the world around him was evident at an early age and his high school chemistry teacher considered him to be of genius intellect.  His professor of physical chemistry, which is the subject that bridges the gap between chemistry and quantum mechanics, at Franklin and Marshall college, Dr. John Farrell, was deeply impressed with his student.  In a most extraordinary turn of events, the professor gradually became the student of the former student.  I know of no other example of a student convincing the professor that the understanding of the subject about which the professor is a recognized expert is mostly wrong.  Ferrell went way out on a limb and stayed there.

This speaks volumes because how can it be said that Mills is not an expert in the subject of quantum mechanics after his academic accomplishments in chemistry and physics?  Nobody gets A's in physical chemistry without understanding how quantum mechanics applies to chemistry.

If someone applies for a job with Brilliant Light Power, which is the latest name for Mills' company, he has some idea what goes on there.  Mills believes he has solved the energy problem that has plagued mankind since the dawn of our awareness of a need to pursue energy sources.  Life can be seen in biochemistry as the way that matter interacts with energy to create autonomous beings.  Energy is part of the economy that can be measured in every chemical reaction in every molecule in every cell of every body.  Nothing is more fundamental to life than energy, yet energy was quite challenging to define.  People now use the word energy to describe aspects of psychology, but that is usually a misuse of a strictly defined physical concept.

Mills mastered the relationship between energy and atoms far better than the existing quantum mechanics had conceived.  He was aware of the failure of accepted quantum mechanics to define an electron satisfactorily.  A physical definition must not be self-contradictory and the quantum mechanics after Schrodinger (SQM) definition of an electron fails to meet this basic requirement.  

Quoting GUTCP (Mills' theory): "In addition, they{students} are asked to take for granted many fantastical concepts such as electrons being probability waves having an infinite number of energies and positions simultaneously, until measured, spooky actions at a distance, and virtual particles which occupy every point in space but can not be detected."

This failure (in the context of classical physics) is not trivial.  An electron is a physical object and physical objects cannot be in two places at the same time.  They cannot have infinite charge density and infinite mass density. What SQM did was to substitute superimposed probability distribution functions for a physical object.  Probability that describes some aspect of a physical object is not the physical object, it is a description of its behavior.  This became physics by changing the philosophy of science.  That philosophy is more foundational than Newtonian mechanics.  SQM was accepted because there was a need to end the crisis in physics that began with the inability to construct a model of the atom that was consistent with the known data.

In theoretical research, the most fruitful areas to re-search are those parts in the development of the accepted thinking that were put in place under pressure, during crisis.  Right?  

During a 1999 American Chemical Society session where Randell Mills was presenting his experimentally verified theoretical results before a room full of qualified chemists, he stated that the ground state of the electron is postulated, not proved.  The video begins with a summary of his basic theory about how hydrogen undergoes non-radiative energy transfer all the time, and this is nothing strange to chemistry.  The non-radiative energy transfer that occurs when nascent hydrogen is reduced to a sub-ground state of energy is catalytic and results in a smaller diameter atom.  The reaction of those in the room, which included Martin Fleischmann, appeared to me to be shock followed by incredulity (at 23 minutes, he asks for questions and the attentive audience has none to ask).  I have searched my many books on the subject of quantum mechanics to find some support for the ground state being something empirically or theoretically substantiated, and I found nothing (but that's just me).  It is supposed to be true, apparently, because it fits the Rydberg formula for positive integer values of n.  There were a few responses in that room, but nobody could counter Mills' assertion beyond saying that the ground state is supported by the standard model. 

The ground state is a most critical question because the most ardent of Mills' opponents reject his theory almost purely on this basis, that there is no below ground state possible.  The empirical evidence that Mills has produced of so very many kinds, confirmed by so many people in so many different institutions, cannot be simply ignored because an ancient postulate says so.  That link to the Holverstott blog on accountability has not been updated.  There have been several other more recent evidences published as articles, one of which Mills describes as "dispositive". 

Some evidence that was found to be compelling by Dr. Conrads for anomalous extreme UV radiation is summarized by Mills.  A glow discharge apparatus in which theoretical conditions for hydrino production are met is operated at just a few volts, not enough to generate any discharge.  In addition, the glow persists after power is cut off, so it is a chemically produced glow discharge.  Conrads expresses a certainty that these data clearly indicate that Mills is onto something.  Why do so few scientists see this, or even harbor apparent curiosity?

Imagine you are a teacher of theoretical physics and you stand before a room full of intensely curious and intelligent young minds.  They have heard stories about quantum mechanics and they want answers.  If you provide a good Socratic answer, "We don't know," this is likely to be unsatisfactory to many students.  Unfortunately, being a professor means being in a popularity contest.  In a contest of being the most seemingly intelligent guy, whoever can impart a sense of understanding to the students (whether or not it is actually sophistry) is the winner.  This has become the goal of many, if not most, academics.  By seeming to put an end to the crisis in physics, the prestige of the academy was restored and a framework for systematizing data was built.  Was that wrong?  Remember, this was well before nuclear science scored any successes like revealing how to commit atrocity on a scale hitherto unknown.  Chemistry was king, not physics, because chemistry had given us so much and still had such rich promise ahead.  Physics was essentially anciently Newtonian, except for some nagging issues about things that seemed unimportant to the ordinary person.  Physics really needed the prestige and without some system of thought about atomic and nuclear science, no amount of gawking at data was likely to advance the thinking.

Johannes Rydberg created a formula to associate atomic data with specific atoms.  Nobody was fooled into thinking that this was a full theory.  It was an association, an empirically derived way of relating atoms to their spectral data, and was extremely useful, but it did not have a meaning, in a classical physical sense.  There was no cause-and-effect and by itself evoked no physical model.

What I did not realize until I began to study GUTCP was that Schrodinger's equation is much like Rydberg's formula.  Actually, Rydberg's formula, as introduced, was far superior to Schrodinger's equation.  Both were arrived at by what amounts to guesswork.  This is not disputed with Rydberg, who was trying various methods of curve fitting and struck gold.  This is an entirely legitimate means of ascertaining pattern.  It is curve fitting, which is quite valuable, but does not satisfy "completeness" as a physical theory.  It did little to relate the pattern to established physical knowledge, but it was an essential clue.  Whatever the complete theory might be, it must satisfy Rydberg.  Mills did.  Schrodinger did not.  Even after Bohr and Dirac, it was relying on mutually contradictory interpretations and had no hope of joining with classical theory, no deriving from first principles.

Quotes from this paper:

"In 1926, just a few days after Schrodinger's fourth and final paper was published, Max Born successfully interpreted ψ as a probability amplitude."

"It should be noted that Schrodinger's wave equation was a result of the ingenious mathematical intuition of Erwin Schrodinger, and cannot be derived independently."

What does it mean that a paper is published and then immediately rewritten three times?  When a paper is so full of errors that it must be immediately withdrawn, rewritten and resubmitted three times, that fact should raise eyebrows.  It indicates guesswork, sloppy thinking, and perhaps no peer-review.  However he arrived at it, the equation which was to become foundational to most all of modern physics was quickly and entirely altered in meaning by means of 'interpretation', which is pretty much synonymous with 'divinely' inspired fudging.  This anonymous author, however, equates fudging with "ingenious mathematical intuition" that arrived at an answer that provides the physicist with an answer for the probability of a particle's position.  The physical meaning of that answer was soon after discovered to be impossible and Max Born radically altered the meaning from a probability of a physical position to a sheer probability.  A probability of what?  Well, what do you need answered?

When a concept is pulled from thin air that appears to have value, this is brainstorming, and it was not wrong to do it.  The pursuit then became to somehow relate it to the established knowledge, that is, to unify theory.  That has not been done, despite many great efforts, although some advocates for modern physics insist that Schrodinger's Equation can describe anything, so it is the ultimate (unified) theory. It can describe anything because it can be manipulated with many arbitrary parameters (basis sets) and when required, the theory can be changed or interpreted to whatever is needed.  This is not a theory.  It's a story expressed mathematically.

What Mills did was to revisit this period of crisis in the development of physical theory.  Mills  understood that the problem with the electron in the Bohr model was that an orbiting charged particle emits radiation because an orbit is a state of motion that is in constant acceleration (the velocity may have constant magnitude, but the velocity direction continually changes, so there is acceleration).  This is why the Bohr model failed, despite being such a good conceptual model that it is still so widely used.

When Mills saw a paper by Professor Haus of MIT, he soon realized that this could perhaps solve this problem of creating a physical model of an atom.  Haus (who stood on the shoulders of several others, who had been trying since 1910) found the conditions under which an accelerating charge particle radiates.  Mills applied the converse of that condition, the conditions under which an accelerating charge particle does not radiate, which is the ground state condition of the electron.

This was like Galileo questioning epicycles by seeking to understand at what point did the adoption of this fanciful concept into the geocentric cosmos happen?  It was when the orbits of planets, as seen from the Earth,  were observed to reverse direction.  Is is more reasonable and pleasing to believe that orbiting planets would change direction, again and again?  Or, might that reversal disappear if viewed from the proper perspective?

Occam's Razor is not a law of Nature, but it sure does help understand how Nature works.  When viewed from a greater perspective of heliocentricism, this reversal in the paths of  planets disappears and their orbits become very consistent and simple.  Then gravity can apply and Kepler's Law works.  The perspective that offers the simplest explanation that is consistent with established knowledge is generally correct.

Consider that the impact of invalidating the Church's authority over questions of physical reality.  It was a very big deal, especially to those who would not budge from their convictions, like the devout Christian monk Giordano Bruno, who held to a heliocentric view of the cosmos and other heresies.  Changes in fundamental thinking about the physical world can have unintended consequences.  Erwin Schrodinger wrote about this in a popular book, a collection of lectures, What is Life?.  In a chapter, Are There Quantum Jumps?, Schrodinger wonders at what the consequences may be for accepting the implications that were proceeding from the acceptance of ideas based on his 1926 paper.  He, like many of the great physicists of the time, thought it would be a good idea to reject it and start over, and they tried it.  The challenge of modeling the atom in terms of classical physics, however, was too great.  They all gave up, and that series of failures left a legacy of resignation.  SQM reigned.  However, Mills has succeeded, at last, if one can accept the opinions of several qualified individuals and a vast amount of empirical data from experiments designed around the physical model he developed.  It is never too late to recognize mistakes.

Is it not a reasonable stance to take the perspective of Einstein, Schrodinger, Dirac, Sommerfeld, etc, and again seek a way to model the atom with classical physics?  Why does that make Mills a heretic?  Could it be explained, at least to some extent, by group think acceptance of Schrodinger's equation, which has had generations to entrench itself into the mass psyche, establishing a mystical priesthood?

Mills has stated that he is rejected because people simply cannot accept that the problem that stumped the greatest minds of the era could be solved.  Difficult challenges may not be solved for a long time.  Fermat did not prove his last theorem, and after many tried and failed, it was eventually proved, and succeeding was a major feat.  The same is true for what it took to develop a physical model of the atom based in classical physics.  Mills was not the only developer, but he was the one who put the pieces together and ran with it.

Two books explore the question of why Mills' theory is not accepted.  Those books are Randell Mills and the Search for Hydrino Energy by Brett Holverstott, and Genius Inventor by Tom Stolper.  To my thinking, if someone had developed a model of the hydrogen atom that performed like the actual atom and used only classical physics (including Einstein and DeBroglie), that would mean that the people of Schrodinger's time, including Schrodinger, would have been very much interested in evaluating it.  Mills theory can be freely downloaded.  The failure of modern theorists to even consider if Mills had made it as far as Haus had agreed he had, which is that "the math is correct" in Mills' model of the hydrogen atom, raises serious questions about institutional academic integrity.  The failure to agree that such an accomplishment must be acknowledged as significant, or even to believe that testing the assertion was important, is daunting.  They just did not care to do so.  They (with notable exceptions) can only see Mills as a threat to themselves, an enemy.  This is the death of academia.  Knowledge issues from open and honest debate.

Kuhn describes the working of normal science as exploration involving competition and cooperation between curious and intelligent minds.  Revolutionary science begins with the discovery of anomalies that cannot be explained well within the established paradigm.  Within the practices of normal science, the existence of the anomalies is first ignored or belittled.  Those who investigate those anomalies are not seen as doing real science, but rather something improper because they are not acknowledging the correctness of the paradigm, but attacking it.  They are infidels and defective students.  People tend to assume that normal science is what is correct until it is no longer possible to recognize things as normal.  People read the Wikipedia page for Mills and are likely to see this as a fair assessment of a crackpot.  What the author(s) of that article failed to do was to present both sides of the arguments.  Wikipedia is seen as an encyclopedia, with people able to represent differing opinions, but this is not at all the case.  Mills has attempted to make the article more representative of the reality, but this is not allowed.  The Wikipedia article is a collection of factual statements, but the complexity of the situations summarized so briefly demands a much more nuanced treatment, with counterarguments.

Science is not a democracy.  To be correct requires no support from anyone.  It requires that one be able to explain why an idea is correct, and that can be a very great challenge if the people who need to gain understanding are strongly biased against you, who refuse to examine valid evidence.  "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it." - Upton Sinclair

If Mills is correct and his devices work, the disruption it will cause is hard to imagine.  People who have built their lives and fortunes upon certain understandings and technologies would suffer great losses.  Their minds reflexively reject such terrifying possibilities and the herd mentality formed with one's peers who all experience the same circumstance and emotions is very strong, even compelling.

"Each individual possesses a conscience which to a greater or lesser degree serves to restrain the unimpeded flow of impulses destructive to others.  But when he merges his person into an organizational structure, a new creature replaces autonomous man, unhindered by the limitation of individual morality, freed of humane inhibition, mindful only of the sanctions of authority." -Stanley Milgram

My position on Mills' theory was one of complete rejection once I realized that he rejected SQM.  I had seen quantum mechanics praised as a mysterious science that few, if any, can grasp, yet it was said to be supreme and proved beyond doubt.  The scant exposures I had to it in college left me with no desire to further investigate.  There is a famous admonition given to physics students regarding quantum mechanics, "Shut up and calculate".  This is not a joke.  It is not supposed to be understood.  Understanding, in the meaning that the word generally has, is part of the philosophical framework that it seems is in existence everywhere, except in SQM.  

But, an explanation for the phenomenon can be completely wrong and the phenomenon does not care.  If the experimental observations made by Mills and others, like Phillips, were correct, it could prove to be the best way to get the excess heat that was driving the cold fusion excitement. 

Obviously, the physics of the atom is quite foreign to ordinary minds, just as is the physics of the cosmos, with its accelerating expansion and singularities.  To judge the theory of Mills, it must be in comparison with the SQM, but the criteria for a comparison requires understanding, there is no comparison with something that is not understandable.  My grasp of GUTCP is quite limited, but the parts I do understand make a lot of sense.  The criticisms that I have read against it frankly are based on erroneous reasoning, such as that GUTCP is not in accord with Schrodinger's Equation.  How dense must a critic be to not realize that the GUTCP begins at the stage of development of theory at which Schrodinger, Dirac, Einstein, Sommerfeld and others would have liked to return (pre-1926)?  If Mills is correct, the Schrodinger Equation will become as significant as Ptolmaic celestial mechanics, of historical interest only, and useless for understanding physics.

My interest was on the side of empirical science.  I was initially focused on the physical proof, not primarily on the theoretical justification of an intriguing idea.  The idea that the electron could go below SQM's ground state is interesting, if it was possible, but I did not know how such a thing would be demonstrated, so I remained focused on the reports of energy released in experiments where the claimed hydrinos were formed.  I still do not understand SQM prohibition against below ground energy states.  It appears Mills is correct in stating that it is a postulate.

What I have come to see in the years of trying to understand both SQM and GUTCP is that SQM was not what I was led to believe in school.  Its history is best understood by me from correspondence between the originators.  They felt pressure to develop a working theory.  The pressure felt by a professor who stands in front of a classroom who must answer the students' desire to understand is considerable.  Feynman had the honesty to admit that understanding of SQM is not possible.  He had the prestige to pull it off without sacrificing his reputation.  But less famous professors had to compete with others who were willing to change the definition of understanding and tell the students that it is understood, and that the students must comply, believe and follow along in the interpretation of Schrodinger's Equation particular to their application.  Maybe they would then someday gain the understanding.  This was quite unsatisfactory from a traditional theoretical standpoint.  Theory is not supposed to change meaning like a chameleon changes color.  The mystery created a priesthood of those who professed a faith in understanding that was purely mathematical and arbitrary.  It has stood for nearly a century, but physics has not gained progress in understanding despite the extreme largess from many governments.  The reason for the stagnation is that scientists are not honest about the history of their own science.  They are not honest about what understanding means.  The universe is not mathematics any more than I am the words I write.  Mathematics is the language of the universe.

"People who say it cannot be done should not interrupt those who are doing it." - George Bernard Shaw